#im introspecting once again apologies your honour
What will be different this autumn?
The epidermis regenerates completely roughly every twenty-seven days. A red blood cell leaving the marrow today will be destroyed in the spleen a hundred to a hundred and twenty days later. White blood cells that have not encountered a pathogen are eaten regardless after thirty days of sentry. The lining of your gut regenerates every two to five days, depending on the acidity produced by your diet.
We who walk into autumn are not entirely we who walked into summer.
Brain, bones, heart, lungs. Spleen, kidneys, liver.
Gallbladder. I feel each of them a little heavier. The muscles that move my arm — the eye beneath the closing eyelid, itself closed. At fifteen I had a mostly new body. At thirty I will be new again in that way.
My shadow keeps growing shorter. Bruised, holding-its-breath September. The green not letting go. Myself not letting go, either. Hands coiled loose in the long grasses, in stray cucumber vines. The poplars coming close in downwind. Almost-embrace.
September. 52 mHz days, deep blue days, night all around but in the wrong way, cluttering my eyebrows.
Sometimes I wonder if instead of living I’m doing it like a man a little ways south the midpoint of his sentence — waiting, empty waiting. Looking at the moon mostly (only) through windows.
Then all of a sudden I slip, a bit like going underwater, my sore feet slick with moss grime. I slip and I recall I am in movement. The downwind catches me again. Kisses the blood bedding my ears, kisses like pearls, the yellow hearts of chamomile.
The wound in my head — the fire there. It’s been burning since spring and I know now it won’t quell soon. Too much gauze, or maybe there’s saltpans, magnesium under the eye-socket, going deep into the brainstem. I thought I’d be dead by fifteen. All there’s to it is that the thought caught up to me.
I listen for birds. The fire burns with a sound a little like the tearing of sackcloth and a lot like them.
Three point one billion miles away, Pluto’s molten heart defines its geography. Its oceans melt, flow, ice — all in one breath. Arrested flux. Pale absynth green.
Change’s domain is the periphery. Everything different, and so, always the same.
